It’s clear that the man-eating tree of Madagascar was a newspaper hoax—a fake story deceptively presented as though it were genuine news. Or rather, it was a series of newspaper hoaxes, because newspapers kept telling new versions. Newspaper hoaxes were quite common in the days when the cannibal tree was originally concocted. Some were jokes. Others were meant to fool people into buying more newspapers. The same year that the New York World published its tree-monster story, another New York paper published a hoax that the animals in the Central Park Zoo had escaped and were killing people in the streets. (For more outrageous newspaper hoaxes, see JUNIOR SKEPTIC #56, inside Skeptic Vol. 20, No. 3.) But if the tree-monster tale was a hoax, who was the hoaxer? Happily, we probably know the answer.
In 1888, Current Literature magazine republished the story but admitted it wasn’t true. According to the editor,
It was written years ago by Mr. Edmund Spencer for the N.Y. World.While Mr. Spencer was connected with that paper he wrote a number of stories, all being remarkable for their appearance of truth, the extraordinary imagination displayed, and for their somber tone. Mr. Spencer was a master of the horrible, some of his stories approaching closely to those of [Edgar Allan] Poe in this regard. … This particular story of…the Devil Tree of Madagascar…was written as the result of a talk with some friends, during which Mr. Spencer maintained that all that was necessary to produce a sensation of horror in the reader was to greatly exaggerate some well-known and perhaps beautiful thing. He then stated that he would show what could be done with the sensitive plant when this method of treatment was applied to it. The devil-tree is, after all, only a monstrous variety of the “Venus fly trap,” so common in North Carolina.